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Rectangular mask with rounded corners, and other oddities
Hi all:
This might seem a completely stupid question, but I’ve searched the forum and the manual and haven’t been able to find an answer: how do you create a rectangular mask with rounded edges? Is the only solution to edit a normal rectangular mask and add control points by hand, or to add a gaussian blur to it?
Also, there’s another odd thing that happened to me today: I had a sequence with about a dozen shots in FCP and did a “send to” Motion; it appeared in the Motion project as a group with a lot of layers, one for each shot. Good so far. I add a rectangular mask to the first layer… and it makes it disappear completely. It doesn’t just mask out part of the layer, as it’s supposed to. OTOH, if I put that rectangular mask on top of the layer, as its own separate layer, it works correctly. I created another project from scratch (but with only one group and one layer in it), and surely enough, adding the mask to the layer works as it’s supposed to. Has anyone else seen this?
Paulo.
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2 Replies
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Howdy,
There’s no automatic way to round rectangle shapes, but you have a few ways to make it work:
First, there’s a rounded rectangle shape preset in the Library which you can edit the size of, but changing the rounding will mean editing the bezier handles.
You can also use Ye Olde Photoshop Trick:
1. Draw a rectangular mask on your image.
2. Apply Gaussian Blur, set the Amount to 50.
3. Apply Threshold filter, set the Smoothness to 0.0.1 and the Threshold to 0.8-ish.
4. Apply Channel Swap and set the Alpha to come from the Red channel.This will give you a nice rounded edge, which you can adjust the size of by changing the Gaussian Blur amount.
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[Jim Johnson] “1. Draw a rectangular mask on your image.
2. Apply Gaussian Blur, set the Amount to 50.
3. Apply Threshold filter, set the Smoothness to 0.0.1 and the Threshold to 0.8-ish.
4. Apply Channel Swap and set the Alpha to come from the Red channel. “Please post this solution back to apple.com Motion forum, too, where I think you asked the same question.
This is funny, it’s what we used to do back in the olden days of AE2-3. So-o-o long ago I completely forgot it could be done this way.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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